The wedding game Book

I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The plot has an interesting element - the suspects in the murder are spread across the country and connected via an email list (focused on the topic of video game design). Because of this, it doesn't have the usual sleuthing you expect in a cozy-style mystery. But Anneke and Karl manage to find a way to do some sleuthing, by taking it online. Intriguing!

The computer components are dated in some ways - for example, the way Anneke dissects their web sites (the details of what a web site would contain back then), the constant references to Altavista as her main search engine, being startled when something turns up a couple hundred hits (today we'd be shocked if it was that few). But others are still with us: private email lists focused on narrow topics, newsgroups like comp.lang.c++, and others. And the debate about game design for girls is pretty similar to what it was then (except perhaps the percentage of games for girls is higher, and the violence in games overall is higher as well). Overall, it doesn't detract from the story - and the nascent 'social network' they move in is an essential component of the plot.